Bill Morrison's documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time opens at the IFC Center (http://www.ifccenter.com/" target="_blank) tomorrow, June 9. Kino Lorber will be opening the doc in other cities.

The movie centers around hundreds of reels of nitrate film, most from the 1920s, discovered under an ice hockey rink in 1979. The footage was in remarkably good shape, although many reels suffered water damage when they thawed.

Morrison covers this story, and it's fascinating, but his movie is also about Dawson City itself. A boom town during a late nineteenth-century gold rush, it flamed out pretty quickly. But at its peak, some 40,000 people lived there, including Sid Grauman, Alexander Pantages, William Desmond Taylor, and Donald Trump's ancestors. (Dawson City is where the Trump family made its fortune.)

Morrison uses recovered nitrate to illustrate his story, and if you've seen any of his previous movies you know his selection and editing of clips is a narrative marvel. Dawson City: Frozen Time is not just for film buffs, it's an illuminating look at social change as a pristine environment is looted and abandoned.